- Using Slack For Project Management Pdf
- Slack Project Management Tool
- How To Determine Slack In A Project
- Using Slack For Project Management
In project management, “float” or “slack” is the amount of time that a task can be delayed without affecting the deadlines of other subsequent tasks, or the project’s final delivery date. The former is called “free float”, and the latter is called “total float”.
Slack is a popular collaboration software where teams and their members come together for a specific project. It provides a hub where users can get their work done, from the start of a project to its fruition. Therefore, we’ve developed a list of Slack tools for project management that we believe are essential to every productive project team. Most of these offer integrations, or apps, for various collaboration tools. At the very least, these apps all integrate seamlessly with Slack.
How Do I Find Float?
The simplest way to compute slack is to subtract the time you’ve allotted to complete a task from the time the task actually takes. For example, if you’ve allotted 10 days for a task, but it only takes you 6 hours to complete, then your slack is 4 days. Tasks that have zero floats can be considered as part of the “critical path” because any delay on these tasks means a delay to the project deadline itself.
To compute total float, you need to add up the free float of all the other tasks in the project. If the number is positive, then you have that much room to finish a project in case of delays or problems. If the number is negative, then you don’t have enough time scheduled for the project and it will most likely miss the deadline.
How Can I Maximize Float?
Using Slack For Project Management Pdf
In order to maximize float, you need to identify your critical path and calculate the amount of float in each non-critical task path. It will help if you visualize the project using a Gantt chart or PERT diagram. With these tools, you can reshuffle tasks and consolidate all of your non-critical tasks into as few task chains as possible. You can then reassign resources and work schedules to focus on the critical chain, and to increase team productivity and efficiency. It may not change the amount of float, but it will get you the most out of those spare hours.
Make sure you revise your float estimates as the project goes on. If one task takes longer than expected, you have the option of using up estimated float from a task further down the calendar. Some project managers add a little bit more float than necessary as a safety measure against unexpected delays.
Of course, there will be circumstances where your project gets delayed no matter how well you manage your float time. Learn from these delays and account for them the next time you schedule a project.
Image credit, Flickr, Kham Tran
Slack Project Management Tool
When Tonya Parker, a mom in Illinois, wanted to better organize her family life a little over a year ago, the first thing she did was set her kids up on Trello, a web-based project-management tool. Parker’s four children, ages 9 to 18, now use Trello, which is more typically used at work, to keep up with chores, to-do lists, shopping, and homework. “I use it every day to keep track of what schoolwork I need to do, or places I need to be, things to buy,” Hannah, her 15-year-old daughter, says.
How To Determine Slack In A Project
“College was my first experience of having to keep track of my own stuff,” Tonya said. “I wanted [my kids] to have that sooner.” Incorporating Trello, along with Gmail, into the Parker family’s life has been a godsend, in Tonya’s view. It streamlined family communication, helped keep everyone organized, and added a layer of accountability to tasks. Now, instead of wondering if her children forgot to do something, Parker says she can ask, “How are you doing on your checklist?”
Using Slack For Project Management
Children’s free-play time has been on the decline for more than 50 years, and their participation in extracurricular activities has led to more schedule-juggling for parents. Parents are busier too, especially those whose jobs demand ever more attention after hours: 65 percent of parents with a college degree have trouble balancing work and family, a 2015 Pew Research Center report found, compared with about half of those without a college degree. In an effort to cope, some families are turning to software designed for offices. Parents are finding project-management platforms such as Trello, Asana, and Jira, in addition to Slack, a workplace communication tool (its slogan is “Where work happens”), particularly useful in their personal lives. In other words, confronted with relentless busyness, some modern households are starting to run more like offices.
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Julie Berkun Fajgenbaum, a mom of three children ages 8 to 12, uses Google Calendar to manage her children’s time and Jira to keep track of home projects. Ryan Florence, a dad in Seattle, set up a family Slack account for his immediate and extended family to communicate more easily. And Melanie Platte, a mom in Utah, says Trello has transformed her family life. After using it at work, she implemented it at home in 2016. “We do family meetings every Sunday where we review goals for the week, our to-do list, and activities coming up,” she says. “I track notes for the meeting [in Trello]. I have different sections, goals for the week, a to-do list.” Her oldest son started high school last year, and Platte says that without productivity and task-management software, she doesn’t know how he could manage it all. Trello allows her son to track responsibilities and deadlines, and set incremental goals.
Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University and the author of Cribsheet: A sizes-at-0=' targeting-pos='boxrr2' targeting-native='standard' sizes-at-976='rail,native'>
“We think of Trello as a tool you can use across work and life,” says Stella Garber, the company’s head of marketing. “The example we had on our homepage for a long time was a kitchen remodel. On our mobile app the example was a Hawaiian vacation. We know humans have a lot of things they need organized, not just what they have at work.' (Slack declined to share any information about how people use its software, and Atlassian, which owns Jira, did not respond to a similar request.)
Despite these tools’ utility in home life, it’s work where most people first become comfortable with them. “The membrane that divides work and family life is more porous than it’s ever been before,” says Bruce Feiler, a dad and the author of The Secrets of Happy Families. “So it makes total sense that these systems built for team building, problem solving, productivity, and communication that were invented in the workplace are migrating to the family space.”
Melissa Mazmanian, an informatics professor at UC Irvine, agrees. “The way that we imagine knowledge work and more and more kinds of work is really about coordination and collaboration across distance, across people’s different time commitments, managing attention, figuring out who’s going to do what when,” she says. “And that style of work … It’s very similar to family life, if you think about it.” Perhaps one’s children and direct reports are not so different after all.
Mazmanian says that these programs might be of particular value to households with two working parents, an arrangement that more children grow up with now, compared with a few decades ago. Without one adult in charge of the professional domain and one in charge of the domestic domain, there’s more coordination of who’s in charge of what—which is something productivity tools can assist with.
She wonders whether a program like Asana might help even out the imbalances in household duties that often arise between partners—especially men and women—by making them more visible. “It tends to be that couples divide this work up in ways that aren’t exactly equitable, and that one person takes on more of that truly invisible work … Something like this might actually be a way for that person to say, ‘Look what I’m doing’ [to their] family [or] partner.”
Perhaps the desire to streamline home life is also a product of how much employers ask of today’s knowledge workers. “I see the use of business software within households as an effort to cope with feeling too stretched at work,” says Erin Kelly, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a co-author of the forthcoming book Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do About It. She says that the “escalating demands” of many white-collar jobs leave workers (parents or not) increasingly frazzled and worn out—so the same tools that systematize their workdays might appeal as a way to cut down on the time they spend organizing life at home.
This strategy doesn’t always play out smoothly, though. For Peder Fjällström, using Slack at home was mainly a fun experiment. A former app designer who lives in Stockholm and is starting a kombucha brand, Fjällström, initially was excited about using the software at home a couple of years after adopting it at work: He custom-built little tools within the program that would let members of his family add an item to the grocery list when something was running low, report “bugs” in the house (like a broken appliance), and determine the kids’ current location (pulled from the Find My iPhone app). On occasion, Slack was also a way for Fjällström and his wife to summon their two kids at dinnertime.
But the Slack experiment lasted only three or four months—the kids soon gravitated toward apps that were “more fun.” After some reflection, Fjällström has concluded that using Slack with his family made home life feel more like work. “It helped at that point in time because it felt like life was a bit messy … but life is supposed to be a little bit messy.” There are things, he recognizes, that productivity software doesn’t optimize for, such as carving out quality family time and allowing children to “feel all the emotions.” “That’s what we’re aiming for at the moment,” he said, “not structure.”